Graham Sellers - Vulkan Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning Vulkan

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The Official Guide to Learning Vulkan

Graham Sellers
With contributions from John Kessenich

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948832

Copyright 2017 Pearson Education, Inc.

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Vulkan and the Vulkan logo are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc.

ISBN-13: 978-0-13-446454-1
ISBN-10: 0-13-446454-0
Text printed in the United States.
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For you, the reader.
Graham Sellers

This book is about Vulkan. Vulkan is an application programming interface (API) for controlling devices such as graphics processing units (GPUs). Although Vulkan is a logical successor to OpenGL, it is quite different from OpenGL in form. One of the things that experienced practitioners will notice about Vulkan is that it is very verbose. You need to write a lot of application code to get Vulkan to do anything useful, let alone anything remarkable. Many of the things that an OpenGL driver would do are now the responsibility of the Vulkan application writer. These things include synchronization, scheduling, memory management, and so on. As such, you will find a good deal of this book dedicated to such topics, even though they are general topics applicable to more than just Vulkan.

The intended audience for this book is experienced programmers who are already familiar with other graphics and compute APIs. As such, many graphics-related topics are discussed without deep introduction, there are some forward references, and code samples are incomplete or illustrative in scope rather than being complete programs that you can type in. The sample code available from the books website is complete and tested, however, and should serve as a good reference to follow along with.

Vulkan is intended to be used as the interface between large, complex graphics and compute applications and graphics hardware. Many of the features and responsibilities previously assumed by drivers implementing APIs such as OpenGL now fall to the application. Complex game engines, large rendering packages, and commercial middleware are well-suited to this task; they have more information about their specific behavior than any driver could hope to have. Vulkan is not well-suited to simple test applications; neither is it a suitable aid for teaching graphics concepts.

In the first chapters of this book, we introduce Vulkan and some of the fundamental concepts that frame the API. As we progress through the Vulkan system, we cover more advanced topics, eventually producing a more complex rendering system that shows off some of the unique aspects of Vulkan and demonstrates its capabilities.

In , we provide a brief introduction to Vulkan and the concepts that form its foundation. We cover the basics of creating Vulkan objects and show the basics of getting started with the Vulkan system.

In , we introduce the memory system of Vulkan, perhaps the most fundamental part of the interface. We show how to allocate memory used by the Vulkan device and by Vulkan drivers and system components running inside your application.

In , we cover command buffers and introduce the queues to which they are submitted. We show how Vulkan processes work and how your application can build packets of commands to be sent to the device for execution.

In .

In , we show how to get images produced by your application onto the screen. Presentation is the term used for interacting with a window system, which is platform-specific, so this chapter delves into some platform-specific topics.

In , we introduce SPIR-V, the binary shading language used by Vulkan. We also introduce the pipeline object; show how one is constructed using SPIR-V shaders; and then introduce compute pipelines, which can be used to do computation work with Vulkan.

In and introduce the graphics pipeline, which includes all of the configuration necessary to render graphical primitives with Vulkan.

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In , we dig deeper into the first half of the Vulkan graphics pipeline and take another look at the tessellation and geometry shader stages. We show some of the more advanced things that these stages can do and cover the pipeline up to the rasterization stage.